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Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

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Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#11

Post by atom-morgan »

bostik wrote: post #6

Writing a book is easy. You sit down by the keyboard, slit your wrists, and pour your self out. (That's not a typo, btw.) I've written one, and in the process acquired a near limitless admiration for those who can do it for living, book after book, decade after another. Even for a topic you feel should be easy - every page that ends up being in the final result, you have written at least 3x. The editing process alone…

I can say the same. I self-published a 500+ page book last year and was so drained from the process I haven't even seriously thought about writing my second book.

When your armchair fan is sitting back criticizing George Martin for not finishing his books, I empathize with him. I totally get it.

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#12

Post by acangiano »

bostik wrote: post #6

Writing a book is easy. You sit down by the keyboard, slit your wrists, and pour your self out. (That's not a typo, btw.) I've written one, and in the process acquired a near limitless admiration for those who can do it for living, book after book, decade after another. Even for a topic you feel should be easy - every page that ends up being in the final result, you have written at least 3x. The editing process alone…

As a side note, don't think writing a second edition makes the process any easier. I recently finished the second edition of my book on technical blogging and I'm left with the distinct feeling of having "changed little" while objectively having spent more time writing this than the first edition.

Still, in the end, you get to hold your baby.

As Winston Churchill said, "Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#13

Post by neilv »

dflock wrote: post #9
mpweiher wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/was/is/g One of the biggest insights I gained was reading about "intention revealing selector". Before that I had thought that we needed "higher level" programming languages, whatever that meant, exactly. This made me realise the importance of naming (one of the two, three? hard things I computer science). If I could find an intention-revealing selector, I didn't need any higher level, because the current level was…

If anyone else was wondering: http://wiki.c2.com/?IntentionRevealingSelector > Name methods after what the method does, don't name methods after how it works.

This rule applies even more to API documentation. As soon as you mention how, that becomes part of the what interface you have to support.

With internal method names, for tricky code, it's a bit more fuzzy, and sometimes I've found that putting how information into the name seems to be a great idea, for readability&correctness of code that calls it. This is more for functions/methods for which the how is relevant (or, you could say, some of the how becomes part of the what).

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#14

Post by mikepurvis »

umvi wrote: post #10
carapace wrote: post #8

(Aw, I was hoping this would be about publishing a book with LaTeX...)

I myself write books in Markdown. Each chapter has a markdown file, the book is version controlled with Git, there is a "build script" that does a "build" (in this case it's a shell script that concatenates the markdown files and runs them through pandoc and calibre CLIs to generate eBooks and PDFs). When I send to my editor I just tell her to modify the files as she sees fit. When I get them back I put the new files…

I wanted to use a workflow like this years ago working with Apress. Possibly (hopefully) things are better now, but at least at the time, all their tooling expected Word docs as the input, and you had to use a very specific stylesheet (including goofy stuff like magic text strings to insert images).

There were also some manual transformation steps occurring on their end, because there was a cutover point where the Word doc was no longer accepted and you had to just quote page and line numbers to get further changes made.

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#15

Post by ghaff »

acangiano wrote: post #12
bostik wrote: post #6

Writing a book is easy. You sit down by the keyboard, slit your wrists, and pour your self out. (That's not a typo, btw.) I've written one, and in the process acquired a near limitless admiration for those who can do it for living, book after book, decade after another. Even for a topic you feel should be easy - every page that ends up being in the final result, you have written at least 3x. The editing process alone…

As a side note, don't think writing a second edition makes the process any easier. I recently finished the second edition of my book on technical blogging and I'm left with the distinct feeling of having "changed little" while objectively having spent more time writing this than the first edition. Still, in the end, you get to hold your baby. As Winston Churchill said, "Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with i…

Back when I regularly wrote white papers/explainers/etc. of various sorts (3K-4K words or so), I often felt a need to redo a piece that was 12-18 months old to fix a couple things that weren't correct any longer, shake any dust off, and so forth.

Invariably, half the thing ended up being rewritten to various degrees. It was still a lot easier than starting from a blank sheet of paper but, as soon as you rework something, you don't want to ignore all the sections that aren't quite fresh, want to bring in new facts and figures, bring in more recent examples, etc.

And, in reality, the extra time is probably justified because the act of opening up an older piece, republishing it, and all the associated background machinery makes it worth spending a bit more time.

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#16

Post by vlehto »

I think the problem is totally different for those who live to see their projects finished. Then there are people like me who have no such urge.

If a person like me can get into the routine of writing (which would be very difficult trick) then the writing itself would probably be quite easy. There is no fear of blank page, no depressive thoughts of "am I ever going to finish" etc. But there is no reward in the other end of the tunnel either. The writing itself would have to be fun enough.

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#17

Post by ghaff »

FWIW, the numbers in that piece seem pretty spot on for me.

Something around 75K-100K words (translating to about 200 pages with some figures, etc.) is probably the minimum for what publishers (and most readers) consider a "real" book.

I've been writing most days for about 20 years. I've always considered 1K words/day a good ballpark for a "writing day." (That's a decent length for a blog post or article.) That's with various meetings and other activities/tasks but without any other major commitment. (i.e. I find it hard to crank out 1K words at the end of the day after getting home from a day of work or an event) I'm considered a fast writer by people I work with.

Do the math. And that's more or less ignoring rewrites, extensive edits, any in-depth research/interviews, and so forth.

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#18

Post by ghaff »

dangus wrote: post #2

At risk of sounding like a low-effort critic, I have to say I'm not sure what we're supposed to take away from this post. It's got about zero useful information or interesting insight. It really does come across as "How not to write a book" but without any sort of...life...to the writing. I say that with nothing but respect and admiration for what Kent has contributed to the world of software engineering. As for this…

I didn't find it so much "How not to write a book" as a description of what writing a book felt like. Maybe there are people who have systematized the writing of a certain type of book to the point where it's just a routine few hours they put in every day. But I think the experiences expressed in this post are more common.

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#19

Post by ghaff »

mikepurvis wrote: post #14
umvi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I myself write books in Markdown. Each chapter has a markdown file, the book is version controlled with Git, there is a "build script" that does a "build" (in this case it's a shell script that concatenates the markdown files and runs them through pandoc and calibre CLIs to generate eBooks and PDFs). When I send to my editor I just tell her to modify the files as she sees fit. When I get them back I put the new files…

I wanted to use a workflow like this years ago working with Apress. Possibly (hopefully) things are better now, but at least at the time, all their tooling expected Word docs as the input, and you had to use a very specific stylesheet (including goofy stuff like magic text strings to insert images). There were also some manual transformation steps occurring on their end, because there was a cutover point where the Wo…

Word docs, Sharepoint. (Though I didn't have that experience with images.)

Re: Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

#20

Post by oceanghost »

sixhobbits wrote: post #3
dangus wrote: post #2

At risk of sounding like a low-effort critic, I have to say I'm not sure what we're supposed to take away from this post. It's got about zero useful information or interesting insight. It really does come across as "How not to write a book" but without any sort of...life...to the writing. I say that with nothing but respect and admiration for what Kent has contributed to the world of software engineering. As for this…

I think it's written for other writers. To help communicate the pain and process. It's easy to feel like it's "just you" and everyone else just shits perfect chapters, one per week, and hits publish. I enjoyed it.

There's an industry of writers providing advice to other writers about writing. Think of it like self-help but for writing.

I used to attend some writers groups, but everyone was always looking for a method that would make writing easy, instead of just writing.

Almost nobody knew what they were talking about. Figuring out what works for you is writing.

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